Slow Network Throughput

[JayFW]

Hi,

my hardware is a Dell PowerEdge 2950

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5320 @ 1.86GHz
4 GB
6 TB 7.2k SATA

I have VMware esxi host and a FreeNAS server. FreeNAS version is 8.2. That is basically the whole network. FreeNAS is just being used for data volumes on virtual machines. Virtual machines are all Windows Server. I've really only been using the FreeNAS for about 6 weeks now, and the last 3 weeks it has been incredibly slow. Not sure what happened with it as no changes were made and the network is so small. The two nics of the server are teamed and running at 1 Gbps.

Both the VMware host and FreeNAS are connected to the same switch and there's a big difference between the two in terms of network speed (copying large files to and from client machines). I have tested speeds using virtual machines built on local storage of the host and virtual machines built on the FreeNAS. This is also especially noticeable during remote backups - the FreeNAS is much slower.

Can someone offer any advice on what I can do/check on this? It's becoming quite an issue now that the backups aren't finishing over night. Attached is weekly interface traffic.

Thanks

 

[jyavenard]

you don't say much about your actual setup. how do you share your files from freenas? are you using nfs or iscsi.
Are you using cifs (windows share) for your backup?

The E5320 is pretty old and far from fast to start with...

 

[gpsguy]

In addition to the questions asked by jyavenard, are you using UFS or ZFS. If the latter, did you read section 1.4.2 in the manual. Please read the "NOTE".

Why would you start with v8.2? Version 8, is up to 8.3.2 now.

 

[JayFW]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm using NFS and the volumes are ZFS. For my backup I'm using a workstation running Symantec Backup Exec and I'm backing up to tape.

I started with 8.2 because I inherited the server from someone else which had it pre-installed. gpsguy, I've been reading this guide: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page, are you referring to a different manual? Doesn't seem to be numbered like that.

 

[dlavigne]

The manual is published as a PDF, per-version. Unless you are testing an upcoming version, you don't want to read the wiki version. Links to the version specific PDFs are listed at the top of http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page.

 

[JayFW]

Thanks, I have only 4 GB installed RAM so I guess that is limiting me, as the caching would be turned off. Ideally I would have 8 GB at least. However, I am only getting 25% the throughput I would expect over a gigabit connection, would buying an additional 4 GB really help me in this regard?

 

[jgreco]

Probably not a great fix. Try 16GB or 32GB and it'll go faster, though still crippled by the slow CPU...

 

[JayFW]

I'll get 16 GB for it and see what performance gains I get from that.